Vacations & Leaving your tank alone

[cumminz]

Are DIY ATO's recemmonded or not?

[McCrary]

If you can get good valves then you can absolutely do it yourself. Grainger sells a really good float valve that you can use for an ATO, but you will need a company name since they don't sell to the public. A float valve that opens the circuit when the water gets too low and closes it when it is high again works well. A safety valve is usually used as well, this is just another float valve that closes the circuit when the valve is raised, this makes sure that if the first float valve doesn't close the circuit there is a back up so you don't flood the house.

[cumminz]

Sounds good to me

[RyanG]

Grainger rocks and so do company discounts! I love that place. Its a toy store for tinkerers

[Bifferwine]

I DIY'd my ATO. No problems so far. But then again, it's a very simple ATO, non-electric gravity ATO. I figure the more simple, the less parts there are to break!

In the past, I've had someone come over once a day to feed my fish and just make sure everything *looks* like it's working okay. Unless you have a friend who also has a tank, it'd be near impossible to teach someone how every piece of equipment you have should be working and what each does. I have always left the business card of my LFS on the fridge and told the pet sitter to call them if there's a problem. I trust my LFS and they will do 24 hour emergency calls (for a fee of course). I figure if something is broken enough for the average pet sitter to notice, it's probably pretty bad.

[sen5241b]

DIY ATO ...

I'm buying the JBR model for approx. $70.

I think the best way to do deal with vacations is to automate as much as possible and ALSO get someone to check on it for you.

[fatman]

Your fish can do without food for two weeks better than the tank can deal with the fish being over fed, so choose and train the tank sitter well. Either myself or my employees take care of my tanks and no one else, my landlord will look in on them. If I am leaving for just a few days I do nothing special except put battery operated air pumps in my tanks. My ATO is only hooked up to a one day reservoir. The battery powered air pumps will operate for 3 days without power and only run when there is no power. If leaving for two weeks and without my employees to check on my tanks, I would just use a ATO reservoir sized for the two weeks, and do no coral feeding for two weeks. I would hook up more batteries to the pumps so as to have a possible two weeks of water circulation if the worst came about. But, I have no fish in my coral tanks and I have internet connection to all but my tanks except the tanks in my apartment. My landlord would at least be able to inform me if the equipment is all working and I have an automatic battery started generator in his garage hooked up to supply power to supply power to both his house and my apartment. It was cheap insurance. $1600 including the switching equipment. The switching equipment (at contractor pricing) cost almost as much as the generator. Still, that is just a small percentage of the value of the main display tanks contents.

[lightcs4]

Fatman,

Great and timely information. I worried about a weekend away and how the fish would do without food.

One thing to add, I failed to get a timer for the lights the last time I left for a weekend. I left the lights on all weekend and think I caused photo-stress. I now have the lights on a timer to prevent this during the next trip.


And ... - my youngest boy is up and wanted to see the smiley faces. How can one say no?